


I'll Find You In The Morning Sun

by rilla



Category: Angels in America - Kushner
Genre: Gen, M/M, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2008
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 22:50:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/34944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rilla/pseuds/rilla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'The Christmas Eve after Prior's T-cell count starts improving after he starts taking the medication that was stolen from Roy Cohn, Louis shows up outside his apartment building.' Prior reaches for more life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'll Find You In The Morning Sun

**Author's Note:**

  * For [madgirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/madgirl/gifts).



The Christmas Eve after Prior's T-cell count starts improving after he starts taking the medication that was stolen from Roy Cohn, Louis shows up outside his apartment building. Prior's curled on the sofa, wearing a purple feather boa that Belize left at his apartment and reading some dumbfuck book that Hannah lent him when he hears something clattering on the window. It takes him a few extra seconds to get up, to massage life into his bad leg and he groans and stumbles a little as he makes his way to the window. Another minute as he wrestles with the window, the stiff old latch flaking rusty paint onto his hands and then finally it's open, coldness hitting his face and making him cough as he leans out into the street.

It's Louis - _obviously_ it's Louis, making a carefully calculated romantic gesture. He's holding a handful of pebbles in one hand, arm drawn back, clearly ready to hurl them up at Prior's window. His breath's a curl of smoky steam on the fresh cold air, and his nose is swollen and red. It really is _freezing_.

"If you throw those at me I will come down there and break your neck with my bare hands," Prior threatens him loudly. His throat and chest feel tight. He doesn't like the cold these days.

Louis' face is lit up with relief. "Merry Christmas!" he shouts.

"Whatever, Lou the Jew," Prior calls. "This isn't your holiday. Go home." He withdraws back into the (nice warm) apartment and is about to close the window when a small pebble sails past him and clatters onto the wooden floor.

He opens the window again and fixes the figure below with a menacing glare over the top of his new glasses. "_What_."

"Can I come up?" Louis yells.

"No," Prior tells him.

"Fine. What are you doing tomorrow?" Louis is going to start bitching about his throat hurting and wondering loudly if maybe he's caught an infection if he stays out yelling in the cold for much longer, Prior thinks vindictively. He's not mad at Lou, not anymore; at least, not _completely_ mad. He still gets these little niggles where he's like, what an asshole, what the hell made me almost forgive him and let him be my friend, but generally it's all okay. He wonders sometimes if they'd still be together, if it wasn't for the sickness. It doesn't matter, though - he's going to live his life on the straight and narrow, looking to the future instead of aching for things he couldn't help but let go wrong in the past.

"I have plans. Christmassy plans." Prior leans out of the window a little further, elbows resting on the cold sill. He should go inside. He'll get sick. Sicker. Whatever.

"With your _mom_?" Louis shouts, looking aghast.

"No! No, you freak. With Belize." Like Prior would ever visit his mother on the holidays, with the dark streak of KS under his chin and his pants still hanging off his hips like he got them from Goodwill, like they never fitted him in the first place, like they once belonged to someone else - which he guesses in a way they kind of did.

"Oh. Okay. What are you going to do?"

"Watch _It's A Wonderful Life_ and paint each other's faces with fairy dust. What're you gonna do, eat Chinese food and go see a movie?"

Prior can't quite see Louis rolling his eyes, but he definitely hears the disgruntled sigh. "Prior!"

"Sorry," Prior says unrepentantly. "Wait." He makes his way back into his apartment, over to the Christmas tree in the corner that Belize made him buy and that Hannah helped him decorate. He grabs a little angel off it, a small pretty thing with blonde wool hair and a soft white silk dress and a wand with a gold star on the end. Beautiful silver wings too. Not like his angels, who were kind of assholes and deliberately difficult.

He goes back to the window. Louis is still there staring up at him, like a rabidly faithful dog or something. "Here." He throws it down and he guesses that maybe his WASP side of him overtook the fag because it jets straight towards Louis' hands, a perfect throw, a perfect catch.

Louis turns it over in his hands. Prior can see her wings bright and silver in the lamplight, her head haloed by - something. "A fairy?" he says uncertainly.

Prior laughs down at him. "You wish, but they're all in bed waiting for Santa to bring them their gifts. No, Lou; it's an _angel_."

"Thanks," Louis begins to call, and something makes him stop. Makes him just smile up instead. And then he says, "Okay, I'll let you sleep. Happy holidays, Prior. I just wanted to-"

He pauses. Prior pauses. They both pause.

"-say that," he finishes lamely.

Prior quirks an eyebrow at him. "You were gonna say you love me, right? We talked about that, Lou. Remember how I can never trust you again, asshole?"

Louis shakes his head, laughs a little. "Okay. I'm going home. Back to Alphabet City. Good night!" He turns and begins to walk away.

"Avoidant!" Prior yells after him, grinning, and Lou's still laughing as he turns the corner.

**

When Prior is hospitalised in 1987 for pneumonia, he is anything but amused. It's September and the leaves are getting heavy on the trees, the air waterlogged and clammy, and he wakes up one morning with the complete inability to breathe.

He mouths, _Crap_, and calls Belize.

**

Turns out, it's just bronchitis. Bad bronchitis. He gets home after a while and discovers that Hannah just started leasing an apartment across the street. She says, "Better safe than sorry," and he rolls his eyes at her and is very thankful.

He can see her kitchen from his window. He can see her when she stands at the counter and mashes potatoes and when she takes her toast out of the toaster and when she takes down the red china teapot and starts boiling water to make tea. Then he calls her and says, "Can I come over?" and she agrees, and he sits at her kitchen table and drinks tea and eats shortbread while she bustles around and tells him all about the homeless guy who puked all over the Mormon Centre that morning.

She's kind to him, touches his shoulder when she walks behind him and tells him that he needs to wear his glasses more often. She peers at the labels on tubes of cream and instructs him to take off his shirt and rubs the cream over his lesions just to see if it'll make them any better, just a little, just a tiny bit. They talk about not much really - he makes her laugh and she tells him he's ridiculous, and on his bad days somehow her brisk breezy manner helps him to keep on bobbing along, helps him hold onto something resembling life.

**

The process of dying is not an easy one. Admittedly death has been somewhat halted in its tracks with his pills, but it's still somewhere near, hovering cloaked and skeletal somewhere in the shadows, around a corner maybe. The pills help, and he's better, less night sweats and less shitting, less hallucinations and less weight loss. A higher T-cell count and that's the main thing. He still has to be careful, and sometimes he gets really goddamn paranoid, like he's on the subway and he kind of wants to cover his mouth in case people breathe germs into him and he gets sick. Dying isn't something that he's particularly afraid of anymore, but sickness, yeah, that's something he doesn't want to have to cope with. He doesn't want to lose those tentative tendrils of friendship that Louis has extended to him of late, he doesn't want the lines around Hannah's eyes to look permanently all deep and worried the way they do whenever she talks to her loser son. He doesn't want Belize to lose another friend, another ex-lover.

Death isn't everything. The end isn't all. He knows that. It's just that some nights his dreams are more haunting than others and he wakes up with aching erections and memories of hermaphrodite beings, all sex and fire and truth, and he thinks, oh shit, even with all that beauty I want to stay here on earth, grip on with tenacity and claws, and he figures that maybe that's the attitude that's got him staying there as long as he already has.

**

"I've decided to get a job," Prior says randomly one day in November.

Hannah looks at him warily. "Have you taken leave of your senses?"

"No." Prior rolls his eyes across at her. "Not yet, anyway," he adds darkly before continuing. "I used to be a party planner. Did you know that?"

"It may have been mentioned to me," Hannah says. She still sounds suspicious, but Prior knows that's pretty much just because she cares about him, and she doesn't want him to do anything that might tire him out or make him get sicker or whatever; but he figures that he knows what's best for him and he certainly knows that sitting in his apartment staring at the same walls day after day and looking up at the vaulted ceiling and wondering will eventually make him crazy. More crazy.

"I figured I should put my skills to good use," Prior says cheerfully. "I'm going to volunteer."

"You know there are spaces at the Mormon--" Hannah begins.

Prior's already shaking his head. "No. A cause that's close to my heart. _My_ cause. I'm going to do something for them and hope that maybe that does something for me as well."

Hannah's nodding across at him, a steadiness in her eyes that says she trusts him to do the right thing for himself and for his health and for other people. It's nice. It's reassuring.

He isn't sure if pure altruism actually exists, if maybe he's doing this volunteering (he's thinking benefits, fundraisers, full of beautiful people with gleaming skin wearing silk dyed in rich deep colors) for himself instead of for other people. But maybe in the end that doesn't matter.

Louis has all these convoluted ideas about community, the sort of thing that he used to blather about first thing in the morning while Prior drank coffee and smoked his first cigarette of the day and tried to look at the _New York Times_ crossword without Lou noticing and bitching him out for not listening to his very important treatise on the state of the world. Prior isn't sure if he's right. Most of the time he isn't even sure what Louis' point actually is, or if he has a real point at all. Sometimes they meet up at diners or in the park, and they sit opposite from each other while Lou talks at him and Prior surreptitiously tries to look at the clock and looks at the stubble rash under Louis' chin. Prior likes Louis and all - he still loves him, a big part of his heart will always be lodged somewhere in Louis' (which sounds painful, bloody, scored with sharp silver blades, and Prior's never going to get that back, will always feel that first cut of the scalpel). But sometimes he can be kind of a drag.

Anyway, he's going to volunteer, get himself out of the apartment and into the real world. He's already called the Gay Men's Health Crisis. He's going to get himself a life.

**

When Prior has sex in April 1988, it's the first time he's had sex since that horrible wintertime in 1985. He and Louis still had a few encounters back then post-diagnosis, latex-sheathed though they were, Prior's diseased skin encased in a filmy bubble, Louis' cleanliness impenetrable; but this is fucking, dirty bareback sex that makes Prior judder and gasp and yell with the heat of it all, the pressure. It's a guy he met at work, at the function that Prior was ticking off things on a clipboarded list for. Shyly presented him with designs for the banners and later admitted that he was positive too, that he found Prior inspirational and very attractive.

Louis calls right after and says, "Let's have coffee this evening."

Prior's sitting on the edge of his bed. There's this six-foot bronzed hottie half-asleep and nestled in his pillows, positive and bright and diagnosed and with Prior's spunk drying on his stomach, and a gawky Jew is asking him out for coffee and he kind of wants to say yes.

He squints into the air for a moment. It's all blurry, his glasses discarded somewhere between the front door and his bedroom. They're gonna be a bitch to find, he thinks drearily, before Louis' voice says, "Prior?"

"Uh, yeah." Prior frowns a little. "Yeah. Okay. Eight outside your place."

Then he hangs up, and later that evening he doesn't bother to show.

**

"My tongue's covered in _fur_," Prior announces petulantly. "Less diarrhea, still some, no blood. Thank God. My eyes are..." He sighs. "Hazy, at the best of times. Sight: it's a crazy thing, n'est-ce pas? Anyway. No new lesions although I can feel one coming just about _here_." He touches his hip tenderly, strokes a finger over the bone that's visible through the translucent skin before rolling his eyes and wriggling impatiently. "Don't ask me how I know, I just do. My leg is okay, although mobility is kind of an issue. Especially when I get tired - which I do, very regularly. But I have friends. They help me get around." He smiles; it feels fierce and private. "Very good friends. Lots of them. Well, except for the friends who're already up there playing shuffleboard with the best of 'em. Like it's a Florida retirement home except dustier. More deserted--"

He cuts himself off. Smiles across at Emily. "I'm sorry, sweetheart. These meetings are all about me. It gets boring, doesn't it? How're you doing?"

**

"Lou still loves me," Prior says bitchily, gazing at Belize, who looks perfectly happy encased in his side of their scarlet-leather booth at the local diner. Autumn of 88, and Prior's weight's been steady (or steady enough, anyway) for two months now.

"You're easy to fall in love with, baby," Belize tells him. He looks tired. Pulling late shifts, Prior expects. Belize is a good person, better than Prior is for sure; he cares about his patients, he stays even when he doesn't have to. Beautiful both inside and out, fabulous and flamboyant and rich and caring.

"Yeah, well." Prior exhales. "It's not my fault that I'm _charming_. Are you eating that?" He paws at Belize's plate.

"Take it." Belize smiles slightly as Prior grabs his half-eaten toast. It's covered in thick strawberry jam and it is perfect. "So how is this _news_?"

"It isn't," Prior admits. "I just wish he'd stop. I'm..." Diseased, he wants to say. It's the first word that comes to mind, although he doesn't think of himself in that way too much anymore. Just when he has a bad day, when the tiredness seeps into his bones and he feels like the weight of the world's balanced on his shoulders, like one foul move and it'll slip right off and crush him on its way down. Then he looks in the mirror and he thinks strangely, _Too late, too late_. For what, he doesn't know, but that doesn't stop him thinking it.

"You're beautiful," Belize says stoutly. "It's understandable. Although I didn't think I'd ever find myself agreeing with Louis on anything."

Prior raises an eyebrow sceptically. "Whatever. You guys are friends now. I _know_, I saw you." He once encountered them in a diner, Belize staring into midair and looking pissed as Louis elaborated upon why exactly - okay, Prior isn't completely sure, but he's pretty sure there was something about how much Republicans suck somewhere in there. Later Belize explained to him that after Prior and Louis had become friends again, their random meetings in diners that Louis had once used to extrapolate information about Prior's general health from Belize had continued, along a vein that was surprising, if not entirely productive.

"Huh." Belize frowns a little but shakes it away. Then he stretches, moving his head from side to side, his neck cracking softly. "Okay, angel. I gotta go. Work beckons. You give my love to that Mormon mother of yours when you see her later."

"Will do." Prior cranes his neck towards Belize, receives the brief kiss he was expecting. "Je t'aime."

"Je t'aime, cherie," Belize responds, expression soft and loving, and touches Prior's hair gently before leaving.

**

Early 1989 and Prior's in hospital again. He thinks maybe he ate something bad or maybe he got some sort of virus but either way he can't stop puking and his shit--well, he doesn't want to think about the consistency of his shit, but it definitely isn't good. Whatever it was that got him sick, he can't afford to lose any more weight or he's fucked, and not in the good way.

He's gazing despondently into a cardboard kidney dish and wondering if he's about to puke again when there's a knock on the door and Louis' head appears around it.

"Hey," he says, quietly.

Prior wrinkles his nose in response.

"I brought you something." Louis comes the whole way into the room, apparently undeterred by the smell of puke that Prior's pretty sure is lingering in the air. He's holding a small teddy bear with a big red plush heart reading `_Get well soon_'.

"I won't," Prior returns dryly.

"You will." Louis bobs from foot to foot, and Prior had kind of forgotten this guy, his Lou with sweet flirtatious smiles and romantic gestures, in the shadow of neurotic Louis who fell out of love with him. "From this, anyway," he corrects himself, and then stands there in dumb silence for a few seconds. Apparently crazy Louis has made a comeback.

"Take a seat." Prior regally waves his empty kidney dish at the plastic seat in the corner where Hannah fell asleep last night.

"I'd rather..." Louis gestures at the empty space next to Prior on his bed.

Prior shrugs, a little. "Fine. But I may barf on you."

Lou smiles, a little. "That's okay."

So Louis stays for the afternoon. He gets Prior to do the crossword with him, reading out the clues and making dumb jokes. He puts the bear onto the bed next to Prior. Its fur is surprisingly soft. He opens the shades, lets cold winter sunlight flood into the room. He tells Prior funny stories about the assholes at work and about this guy on the subway who spilt hot coffee on his own crotch and about this homeless guy selling kisses for nickels. When Prior has to puke he holds the kidney dish and sits next to him. He presses a kiss onto the nape of Prior's sick-sweaty neck right as Prior's hurling up ice chips.

After he's done throwing up, Prior says with a little amazement, "Well, look at you. I think you finally grew up."

Lou smiles, bright, and says, "I've been working on it."

**

In spring the same year, Belize kisses him for the last time; while it's not the last ever kiss between them, it's the last kiss with any intent other than friendship and companionship behind it. It's an aching kiss, searching, finding; and Prior responds for a moment, surging forward towards Belize, his familiarity and solidarity something beautiful and safe. He feels like their park bench on this bright day in the park suddenly got lit up by a thousand stars, but then he pulls away with a sick sad feeling in his stomach.

"Listen." Prior clears his throat. He can feel annoying tears starting in the back of his eyes, a pain in the top of his nose. "You're perfect. You are. You know you are."

There's something in Belize's eyes that Prior hasn't seen there for years, that he'd thought was left in the past, that had been shut away with their old drag costumes and that thick crimson lipstick that Prior had once loved. It's been there for a while, he realises with an acuteness that shocks him to the bone. Maybe forever. "But I'm sick," Prior chokes out. "Like, really sick. And I don't wanna--"

Belize nods, puts a finger to Prior's dried-out lips. "It's okay," he says. His voice is beautiful as ever, deep, sonorous. Then he pulls away and laughs, like maybe it's the end of something, or the beginning. "We're gonna need to get you to a drugstore," he tells Prior. "Those lips are getting to be a little tragic."

**

"My son called," Hannah tells Prior in late '89. The leaves in the park are turning brown, heavy on their branches. Hannah's been changing, over the last few years. Beautiful wellmade clothes, good haircuts. Prior took her to Bloomingdale's to pick out her colors, so she's wearing makeup, mauve eyeshadow that makes her eyes look wide and beautiful. In fact, a guy _just _checked her out - although naturally, she didn't even begin to notice.

"Oh?" Prior says. Her son that fucked Lou, that ran out on his crazy wife and made his mom move all the way across the country. Prior is not an ideal son exactly, but at least he can say with all honesty that he isn't _that_ bad.

"Yes." Hannah's frowning slightly, gazing into the sun, eyes slitted. "He met a man."

"Oh." Prior glances cautiously at her. "How do you feel about that?"

Hannah sighs, heavily. "Well, as you know, my views have changed. I'm a little more..."

"Hate the sin, love the sinner. Preach it, girlfriend," Prior grins as he twirls his cane between his hands.

Hannah rolls her eyes at him. "Oh, honestly," she says, amusement rich in her voice. "I love you, and I love Belize, and I love Louis. Nobody's perfect, but I love you boys. You're my family here."

"You make your own family. Your own home," Prior muses, and Hannah catches his eye.

"Exactly." She takes his hand in both of hers, and squeezes it, smiling softly at him. "I'm glad for Joe," she says. "I hope he's doing well. He says he is, but a mother, you always worry when you're a mother."

"Mine doesn't," Prior points out.

Hannah shakes her head. "Oh, she does. It's fathers you should worry about."

Prior presses his lips together and tries to suppress a smile. "Okay. You wanna go for coffee? It's cold."

She nods at him, smiles. Then she stands, and extends a hand to him. He has to lean a little more heavily on her than he'd like as he stands, his leg stiff and sore, but he grits his teeth and he's okay as he finds his rhythm when they begin to walk. He looks back at the fountain as they leave. He's always afraid every time he leaves the park that it'll be the last time.

**

Christmas Eve of 1990, and stones are rattling at Prior's frosted window again. He's resting his eyes, sitting at the table in the corner, head in his hands. He gets more headaches these days. His eyes are getting pretty bad, as it happens. He can't read so much anymore. He gets tapes of books, audio books, and makes people go everywhere with him in case he does something dumb and steps in front of a car he somehow managed to miss. He reaches for his cane, pushes his glasses on and the world comes shakily almost into focus.

He hobbles to the window, leans on the frame as he jerks it open. "Whaddaya want, Lou?" he shouts. Louis still has that beard that Prior and Belize both told him was stupid, but that Prior secretly thinks is kind of hot.

"Let me come up!" Louis shouts. "I want to talk to you."

Prior squints down at him. His features are barely visible, his face a fat pink blur. That isn't how Louis looks, not at all. "Fine," he says, and closes the window. He makes his way over to the intercom, and buzzes him in. It's only a minute or so before there's a knock on the door, and from the couch Prior calls, "It's open!"

There are shuffling noises from the hallway as Louis stamps snow from his shoes. "Jeez," he says as he comes in. "It's cold out there."

"No shit, Sherlock, it's snowing," Prior drawls at him. "How's it going, Lou?"

"Good. Good," Louis says. He closes Prior's door and begins to shed clothes, scarf, hat, gloves, boots. "I love this city in the winter."

"I used to," Prior says coolly. The cold air makes him cough. He had to give up work midway through the year and he misses it like hell, and sometimes he thinks he might be going crazy again. He isn't sure if his medication's working any more. He dreads seeing Emily, he dreads test results. He doesn't think he's going to get to see the fountain flowing again. It feels as though spring will never come.

"Yeah." Louis exhales, and sits down next to Prior, exuding cold. Grudgingly, Prior offers him some blanket. Louis shakes his head quietly, and Prior narrows his eyes at him.

"What gives? You're not gonna talk to me about the new president of Serbia? What about Mary Robinson? Triumph for feminism," Prior tells him.

"I'm a selfish asshole," Louis reminds him. "Maybe if she'd been gay. Or a Jew," he says, self-deprecation in his voice, and Prior likes that he's learned that. "Prior, we need to talk. I can't do this."

For a sickening moment Prior thinks that what Louis means is that they can't be friends any more, that Louis can't watch him get worse, can't hang out with him and sympathise when his belly's hurting so much he can't see straight, can't bring him news on the voluntary work that Hannah took over for him because he didn't want to leave any empty spaces where he had once stood. Can't be around anymore.

"Oh," he says, very coldly, voice not sounding like his own. He's dizzy, horrified, furious.

"I... what's wrong?" Louis' voice rises in both volume and pitch before he lets out this weird noise that's half laugh, half sigh. "Oh. _Oh_. No. Not that."

Prior's heartrate begins to go back to normal.

"I meant," Louis says to him, and then reaches out and takes Prior's hands in his. They're cool, dry, gentle, holding Prior's hands like he's unafraid of breaking him, just aware that he's holding something precious. "It's been five years," Louis says.

"Since?"

"Since us."

Prior nods.

"I miss you," Louis admits.

"I haven't stopped dying, Lou," Prior tells him strictly. "It's still gross. There's still shit and blood and pain. Still death at the end, except now it's sooner. I have less time."

"I know." Louis is desperate, loving. "Let me come back. Please." He pulls something small and dusty out of his pocket; a small angel that Prior gave to him years ago, her hair dull, her wings torn, her powers undepleted. "See? I've carried you with me all this time."

Prior looks at him, his steady willing eyes, and then looks around. His apartment is dusty and he can't see well any more so he can't find anything, and he doesn't like going out by himself, and most of the time he doesn't want to cook so he's spending too much money on takeout. It's all getting to be kind of tough by himself.

He says, "Okay."

Louis just kind of - melts. Folds forward, wraps his arms around Prior. He's warm and solid, all health and man, his face pressed into Prior's neck. Gently he presses his lips to Prior's lesion, and then pulls away. Meets Prior's eyes. "You are worth this," he says then, looking at Prior like he's some kind of priceless thing.

"You're sleeping on the couch," Prior tells him.

"That's fine," Louis agrees, pathetically quickly.

Prior has loved this foolish man for so long. Too long, probably. As he pushes forward, rests his head on Louis' shoulder and gives himself over, he thinks vaguely that Belize is going to laugh at him so much for this, and feels a little pang.

**

It won't last forever, Prior knows, this easy equilibrium with Hannah across the street and Belize down the road and Lou on the couch. He knows that time's ticking away, that hours are fluttering by like the wings of butterflies, that maybe God isn't on his side on this one, that maybe the human race really is deserted. He knows that one day he's going to get sicker and weaker, and he knows that he's going to die young, younger than he should. He knows that one day he's going to see the Bethesda fountain for the last time.

He never found the love of his life, he just fell in love over and over again, in the most random places. Loved a onetime drag queen who loved him back with pure, pure spirit and generosity, loved a woman bathed in drugs with moonlight and melancholy shining in her wide dark eyes, loved a Jewish boy who grew to be a good strong man, loved his kind steady Mormon mother.

It'll all be worth it in the end, Prior figures. Life really is something he doesn't want to let go of. It is an addiction, for those sunlit moments when his eyes are clear and someone's laughing beside him.

As for his angel, he dreams about her sometimes, but she constantly eludes him; knows that one day the dream won't end where it usually does, standing on the dusty steps of heaven and looking around desperately. He knows that one day he'll catch up to her, he'll know, he'll find her, he'll stay with her.

But for now he's got his little life on earth to contend with. Bitching at Louis over too-strong coffee, Hannah showing Belize how to crochet and telling them about the letter she got from her errant daughter-in-law. He has a home here on earth, bustling and busy and evolving and changing, and his sickness will not be the end of him. This family that he created are not the only ones who laugh and tell stories, joke and talk of love; he's right there among them, at the heart of it, and even if one day he's gone, he knows that somehow part of him will remain.


End file.
